Financial Concierge | Blog
By Janet Jackson, March 2nd, 2025
Did you know that in 2022 the Bank of Canada (BoC) and a few large provinces had unclaimed bank accounts and estates totaling $1.8 billion dollars?
That number has more than doubled since 2010 and it keeps growing, despite the government’s best efforts to find the owners.
If certain financial products are not used for 10 years, federally regulated banks will consider the balance as unclaimed and the funds are transferred to the BoC. The BoC’s unclaimed balance of $1.1 billion represents 2.5 million accounts that have sat dormant for over 10 years. If the unclaimed funds are not reclaimed within 30 years, they are transferred to the government’s accounts.
This article speaks to how this situation could happen, steps you can take to avoid it, and how to discover an unclaimed account and recover any missing funds.
If you don’t organize and document your accounts, you and your family could go without funds you could use today – or your heirs may miss out on their full inheritance when the time comes.
Janet Jackson, Financial Concierge
